Still in Maputo

I spent the weekend in Maputo -- it wasn't my original plan. I'd intended to go to the northern part of the country for a few days and visit our programs, but the flights were $500 and it just didn't seem justifiable. So I enjoyed a weekend with nothing in particular to do. I'm staying with a wonderful woman who is in the country for 3 years, volunteering with our organization. Sunday, she and I took a long walk along the beach and decided to return towards the apartment by cutting through town rather than doubling back.

Before I say anything more, I should emphasize that I have lived in Baltimore City for eight years and I have traveled to roughly ten countries in Africa, some of them just coming out of civil war. I have never in all that time been threatened with bodily harm or had anything stollen from my person. But there's a first time for everything...

My friend and I were making our way up a dusty road just a block from the ocean and I was telling her the story of my life (we had a lot of time together) and how I became a Christian. I was just approaching the tumultous teenage years as a man walked directly towards us, pulled out a large kitchen knife and said to me, “Your bag, your bag, your BAG!” and I said “Okay” (he was so impatient). I quickly pulled the purse strap over my head and transferred the purse to his hands. It was over in 4 seconds. He was gone.

Luckily, all I had in the bag was a pack of gum and my wallet with a few credit cards, much less cash than he was probably hoping for, my drivers’ license, a few gift cards (damnit I should have used those by now -- but good luck to him finding a Pottery Barn in Mozambique) and assorted membership cards. Thank God my passport and the bulk of my cash wasn’t with me. We walked the rest of the way home and I called Richard to get his help cancelling my credit cards. And that was that.

Richard said to me on the phone, "I'll pray for you, and for him." He was grateful I hadn't tried to use my Jujitsu (this man didn't look like his principles would keep him from using the knife). But Richard's words made me wonder about the man who took my purse. I wonder how he'll spend (or has spent) the $30 he got from me. Maybe he has a baby he's trying to feed, or ailing parents. More likely, he just wanted it for himself. I don't mind that he took it, to be honest, and the whole thing could have been a lot worse.

I'm thankful that my life circumstances are not so desperate that taking someone's possessions at knife-point seems like a viable response.

Maputo

I've been in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, for five days now. Like so many major cities in impoverished nations, Maputo is a study in contrasts. There are cars all over the place--most of much cleaner than I ever keep my car at home--but drawn to the cars like magnets are beggars at every corner, and every mile or so the driver has to disengage an alarm that is meant to discourage carjacking. This morning, I walked along the road that runs behind the guesthouse where I'm staying, the road that overlooks the Indian ocean. I watched the sun rise over the serene water, trying to keep my gaze away from the heaps of garbage filling the ditch beside the sidewalk. Along the road, American-style townhouses rose three-stories high and enjoyed manicured lawns and outdoor seating areas fenced in by concrete walls. Along the tops of the walls, curled barbed wire sternly warned trespassers to stay away; cheerful vines wrapped around the wire to add splashes of color and camouflage the spikes. The view of the ocean was punctuated by boys and men dressed in torn clothing, lying on the sidewalks or sitting solemnly or begging with hand outstretched or tending to fishing nets.

It is difficult to know what an appropriate response to these contradictions is. Cynicism seems like the lazy way out. Blind trust that God is in control and protects His own seems shallow and narcissistic. Sadness, wonder, a longing to understand, a passion to bridge the gap -- are these things that are honoring to God? Are they honoring to the people who spend their days begging along the side of the road? Can consciousness and conscientousness and compassion change what appears to be an impossible situation?

Week in review...

After a rough weekend, the work week didn’t look it was going to be much better. I fear a new war may be developing at work. I’m constantly asking myself how much more I can take, what I should do next, where I should focus my energy, how I’m supposed to know what is good and right.

But some good things came out of the week:

Ø My boss’s boss reversed a decision he had made last week that would have thrown even more of my job into chaos. At least now I feel like I have a little breathing space.
Ø Richard and I bought a new tree last weekend to put in the front sidewalk (to replace the very sad Charlie Brown tree that was there before). It’s a weeping cherry tree. It’s only about 6 feet tall right now so it looks a little pathetic and the neighbors’ kids ask us if this one is dead too, but I’m so happy with it. Something about weeping trees makes me happy.
Ø Richard has been working on painting the front door (which we replaced in December but hadn’t gotten around to painting). It’s a beautiful blue, a deep slate blue that is restful and confident and disarming. I love it. He’s also painting the frame around the door and windows and putting up new numbers to identify the house. We’re going to have a beautiful front-of-the-house.
Ø We had a contractor to the house on Thursday to give us an estimate for removing the concrete from the back area, laying paving stones and erecting a trellis and pergola. I think we’re going to move forward with it. it will give us a little shade, a lot more character and a flower bed with enough dirt that we won’t kill our plants in three months. Hopefully. We’re going to have a lovely outdoor area out back.
Ø I survived. I’m now in the Johannesburg airport getting ready to fly to Maputo, Mozambique, shockingly peaceful with the knowledge that I have four weeks away from the office. And in just three weeks, Richard and I will be on a week-long vacation in Lake Tahoe…

I usually hate it when people say, “God is good,” probably because it seems like people only say it when things are going well and so it seems phony and not well thought through. But being in this faraway airport, completely conscious of the fact that life is hard right now and the future is a big fat unknown and I’m not in the healthiest emotional state of my life, I can’t help but acknowledge: God is good. With all the crap and the chaos and confusion, there is beauty and mystery and hope. Always hope. Odd how the question of life so often leaves me wanting to curl up in a ball and tell God, “I give up, I don’t know the F*&%ing answer!!” Perhaps the fact that the question remains even when life is truly stupid and illogical is a miracle in itself.

Sunday Night

I've been angry at my husband this weekend. There's no apparent reason for it. I'm mad that he wants to talk to me, that he asks what I want to eat for lunch or dinner. I'm mad that we have to make decisions together, that my decision to be in a bad mood matters to him. I'm mad that he doesn't understand what I'm thinking or feeling, that he doesn't know how to make me feel better, that he doesn't know what I need and when. I'm mad that I would have to tell him all these things in order for him to know them, and I'm mad that I would have to figure out what I know before I could communicate that to Richard. I don't feel like taking the time, investing the effort, to be still with myself long enough to analyze the make-up of irritability, anxiety and discontent that grows over my being like mold.

Crazy

Last night I returned from two days in Ohio where I was visiting a couple of church partners. I have one week left in the office with my boss who is moving on, then I get on an airplane headed for Africa where I'll be for close to three weeks. Then 36 hours after arriving in Baltimore, Richard and I will go on a week's vacation in Lake Tahoe. I'll be outside of the chaos of HQ for four straight weeks.

Crazy.

I've been struggling with the question of how to live generously in this world where hand-outs create as many problems as they address, well-meaning organizations are run by prideful people who care more about their status than the state of the world, and I want more of whatever I have and fear we won't be able to pay our mortgage. How does one balance the call to give sacrificially with the realities of ever-increasing bills and ever-limited time? Something is wrong with this place in which we live.

My boss's boss forwarded me an email written by my boss's previous boss and current nemesis, who apparently doesn't think terribly highly of me either. Her words that questioned by abilities and capacity stung like a hornet, pierced my sense of self with an arrow, confirmed my deeply-held suspicions about myself. This woman--whose abilities and capacity are similarly questioned by many in the organization and who is viewed as a crazy cat lady by many others--somehow managed to throw my inner world into turmoil and led me to question whether I have any value or should just quit and let someone more capable take over. Whatever the truth may be, it's amazing to me that one person whom I don't even respect a great deal has the power to unsettle my soul. When will I learn to rise above such disturbances?

Last weekend, I had another encounter with the extraordinary woman I referenced in the last post. I'll call her LD. She asked me to take her to church Saturday evening, so Richard and I picked her up and sat with her and two of her friends. Two songs that had been in my mind for no apparent reason were sung that evening, which was astounding to me and beautiful and a little bit tragic. It again took us an hour to get LD out of the building after the service, she was so so intent on trying to talk her other friend into driving her an hour north the next week to go to a baseball game. As we dropped her off at her parents' condo, she asked if I'd take her to Sunday's service as well. I said I didn't plan to go but she could call me if she was unable to find another ride. Note to self: don't say things like that to a manic woman with no boundaries. She called a couple hours later to say she needed a ride; I agreed to pick her up.

So Sunday we were again sitting in the front of the large auditorium, but this time LD had nobody else to share her exuberance with, so I took it all. She held my hand and laughed with me and told me to raise my arms as we sang. Throughout the sermon, she frantically wrote notes to me on a pad of paper, trying to convince me that it was God's plan for me to work for her (as a personal assistant / co-singer in her nonexistent worship band) and asking me if I had suffered a great deal in childhood. It was, in a word, surreal. But after the service as we talked to a mutual friend who insisted I was a saint and a good person, LD demanded that I listen to this man because he was a truth-teller. If for no other reason, I could believe that God wanted me to be with LD at that moment so I would be forced to listen to two people tell me I was good, I was loved, I was God's.

I finally dropped her off two hours after the service ended. That evening she left a frantic message on my phone saying she needed a place to stay for the night because there had been an emergency and she was locked out of her parents' home. I called her back and, to Richard's great dismay, I allowed myself to be talked into picking her up so she could stay with us "just overnight," as I explained several times that we had other company coming the next day. Richard was, to put it mildly, concerned. Just as i was preparing to get in the car, our phone rang and a staff person from the church informed me that LD's parents were sitting in a courtroom at that moment awaiting an emergency court order for LD to be taken to the hospital for treatment of severe mania. The police had been to the condo twice already that day and she refused to check herself in. The staff person asked if I would please not come to LD's rescue, for her sake and for my own safety.

I don't doubt that LD is an extraordinary woman, but like so much else in this world, she was dancing on the line of sanity. I left her to dance alone. I hope she will forgive me.

Monday, on my walk to work, I finally introduced myself to the homeless man I pass every day. He seemed surprised that I would care what his name was, that I would take the time to ask. It was James. I'm grateful to know him.

An Extraordinary Woman

I've been meaning to write every day for the past two weeks (or however long it's been since my last post). There is so much to write about: my boss is leaving, throwing life at work into yet another tailspin of transition and uncertainty (but what's new about that?); concurrently, I'm trying to figure out what God wants me to do with my life; we gave our cat away; Richard and I had an amazing conversation the night before he left for Asia and somehow he is home already and I haven't even fully processed that night; I read a deeply moving book on vacation that continues to haunt me with its insights about women and voice and dissociation of self...

But here's where I'll start: Last night, I met an extraordinary woman. It began with an email from a woman at my church, asking if I could drive a person undergoing cancer treatment to the Saturday evening service. This person, Lorraine, apparently lived just a few minutes from me. I was scheduled to sing at church all weekend so I said I'd be happy to take her if she didn't mind arriving more than an hour early. I left my cell phone number in an email and didn't hear anything. Then just moments before I needed to leave my house for the service yesterday, I checked the voice messages on my home phone and found that Lorraine had called and really hoped I would call her back because she really wanted to go to church. I called her and, 10 minutes later, was picking her up in front of a condominium high-rise. She had told me on the phone: "I'll be the one with the chemo haircut, waving my arms." She had also told me that she was back from the dead.

I had a sense when I received the first email about her that there was something ordained in our meeting. Not a spooky, overwhelming sense, just a quiet understanding: this request was not one I would or could ignore.

Lorraine got in the car. A heavy-set woman in her early 40's (though it's hard to say), she had blonde stubble on her head hidden by a white Orioles baseball cap. "I know you, I've seen you," she said to me. Presumably, she had seen me sing at church. She complimented my perfume, then smelled her shirt and said she hadn't put enough deoderant on. I told her not to worry, my perfume was enough to cover both of us; she asked if I had any more with me; I didn't.

I wanted to know Lorraine's story: how she came to Baltimore, what kind of cancer she had, why she had been through a living hell for the past 7 months ("Have you read the story of Job? That's my story. Literally.") and how just two weeks ago emerged from it with a new passion for life. She was like Lazarus, she said, and she was as disoriented as she imagined Lazarus must have been when Jesus brought him back from the dead. "Just wait, you'll notice how people at church see the difference in me; they'll be shocked. 'You're back!' they'll say." But she told me the story was too long. She would tell me someday if I wanted to hear it, but it would take longer than our 20-minute drive.

So I attempted small-talk with Lorraine, a woman who has come back to life and has not talked much in the past 7 months so she has a lot to say. Some of the people in her life thought she was manic, but she didn't agree and even if it was true she didn't care; her psychiatrist and counselor and doctors told her to enjoy it while it lasted. She was happy to be alive. She said she couldn't drive herself because she loved listening to worship music at full volume and driving really fast, so she was a danger to others on the road. Lorraine is a physician. She asked me if I knew what the gift of knowledge was -- it seemed like a trick question so I said no. She said it had to do with medical intuition and, for her, it meant she knew which of her patients had cancer and was able to help them detect it early enough to have positive outcomes. Somehow, this related to her oncologist, I think because he also has this gift (though it was hard to follow everything she said); I asked Lorraine the name of her oncologist and it turns out she sees the same doctor Richard has been seeing since being treated for colon cancer five or six years ago. What a strange coincidence, I thought.

The drive went pretty quickly. We hugged inside the church before I went into the auditorium for rehearsal; we agreed to meet by the information desk after the service. I entered the green room feeling slightly disoriented and trying to make sense of the stream-of-consciousness conversation I'd just engaged in.

When the service started an hour later and the worship team took the stage, I saw Lorraine standing in the second row, talking to people around her. I smiled at her but couldn't see her eyes because of the lights on stage. The worship was rich (although the producer later told us backstage that the sound was "horrendous" because the "balance" was off; something to do with the bass driving the set, the drumming being too tentative, and the lead instrument not taking an assertive enough lead. I didn't really care.).

The service ended after the sermon and I stood by the information desk as we'd agreed. Fifteen minutes passed, then 30. The flow of people exiting the auditorium slowed to a trickle. I entered the auditorium and looked towards the front -- Lorraine was there, sitting with another woman and a teenage boy. Lorraine was talking almost non-stop. I sat down next to her, trying to be patient, knowing that Richard was probably arriving at home right about now and waiting for me; we'd not seen each other for almost two weeks. My subtle attempts to end the conversation and move us in the direction of the door were unsuccessful, so after another 15 minutes I said we should go. Just 15 minutes after that, we were back in the car.

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows I'm not the most patient of people, so the whole experience was truly testing me. Strangely, I didn't feel very anxious or rushed, and I truly was eager to learn more about Lorraine and, perhaps, to learn more about myself through Lorraine. It was true that she seemed quite manic, not all there, a little disjointed, but I firmly believe there's only a very fine line between madness and prophecy and perhaps it is not up to us to judge which is which. Something inside of me wanted to break out in tears and confess every sin I could think of to this woman who had known me for just 2 hours. She asked me if I knew what a micvah was (sometimes she said "mitzvah" -- I think she meant mitzvah, though perhaps not), and I said I thought I knew but (again it felt like a trick question) she could tell me. She said, "Are you a good person? Are you generous with your gifts?" I said probably not, I probably wasn't a very good person and I probably wasn't as generous as I could be. I mean, if she has the gift of knowledge, surely she could have figured this out for herself. So she didn't tell me what mitzvah/micvah meant until later in the car-ride (had she forgotten she was being told not to tell me?). In basic terms, it's a blessing that you are blessed to give someone else. Something you pass along, recognizing all things come from God and are given to us to be given away. (Caveat: this is cheap theology and I'm writing it after two beers and I'm not terribly concerned about the accuracy of my statements anymore, just trying to get through the story.) Lorraine told me I was blessed just to be able to know this, just to have met her -- this alone was a blessing. And she was right. She said she was sure I would become the person God made me to be. I could weep. But for now, I should be as generous as I could be, especially with homeless people. I thought immediately of the man I pass each morning on my walk to work. What am I to do for him?

There is so much more to say -- and so much more I want to learn from Lorraine, whether she turns out to be a prophet or sage or just a very wacky woman with a lot of hard-to-string-together-thoughts. I look forward to the journey. God, please let our paths cross again.

Summer Weddings and What I Think of the Golden Gate Bridge

We’ve spent the last week-and-a-half trying to create a vacation out of to two weddings -- one in Minnesota and one in southern California...So we were provided two occasions to witness the exchanging of vows, the expression of faithfulness and commitment, the hope and joy of beginning a new life together. Unfortunately, on the whole, Richard and I agree that the past 10 days have not been our finest. I experienced much of the trip as a stark reminder of the seemingly inevitable distance that exists between people, even people who have been made one through marriage. It can feel as though we are worlds apart even when we’re right next to each other. The irony is that tomorrow, Richard will get on an airplane headed for the Philippines. I wonder if the physical distance will be easier for us to take than the emotional.

The weekend before last, we were in the thriving metropolis of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, birthplace of Bob Dylan and home to tourist magnets like a paper factory and iron mine. We were there to attend the wedding of Richard’s niece, a delicate 22-year-old with a sensitive heart and a flare for the dramatic. It was fascinating and at times painful to watch this beautiful girl as she prepared to leave home and move into the half-completed house being rehabbed by her now-husband. So much uncertainty, so much disorder, so much to try to get under control. She threw herself between extremes of effusiveness and emotional shutdown. I felt a strong protective urging towards her but knew I was not (and am not) going to be the one to save her or bring her balance, should she need either. I do hope we continue to see her regularly and grow closer to her and her husband.

After the weekend in MN, we flew to California to spend a few days vacationing in San Francisco, visit my sister and nephew in San Diego, and attend a wedding in Pasadena. For the first leg, I had reserved a room at a bed-and-breakfast at the top of a hill just 10 minutes from downtown San Francisco. At least, it was referred to as a “bed-and-breakfast” online; in actuality, it was the home of a practicing progressive Jewish couple who rented out the spare bedroom to unsuspecting tourists in search of a romantic but not-too-pricey getaway. The house was beautiful and the couple very kind, but private this B&B was not. It was more like staying at your uncle’s house. We found ourselves tiptoeing from our room to the bathroom down the hall to avoid the embarrassment of being seen in our sleep-wear.

Our time in San Francisco was brief. The first day, I woke up very early with a nasty headache that only vacated my body four or five hours later when I finally gave in and took my migraine injection (which Richard likens to nuclear war). So by 10:30 we were on our way to a café. By 11:30 we were exploring downtown. By 1:30pm we agreed we had seen enough of Chinatown, Union Square and the nearby neighborhoods and were ready for bigger and better things. So we made our way down winding streets and up steep hills to the Golden Gate Bridge. Granted, I’d seen this bridge before, but I wasn’t all that impressed.

This would be a good time to confess that I am a bad tourist. I get antsy on tours, I hate being bombarded with information I’ll never retain, I feel like a failure when bored after 45 minutes at a museum, and I can’t read a map. I’ve been meaning to start writing a travel-book series called “The Half-Ass Tourist.” I don’t say this proudly, just in the spirit of self-revelation.

More on the trip and other exciting revelations later…This post has become too long.