The Time of Lasts

David Oren and I, crashed out at the Addis airport after a 13 hour flight from Washington DC.

I have been aware of the significance these days have for us, since our arrival in Bujumbura this past week.  We are officially into the ‘time of lasts’.  That is to say, that every day that passes from here on will represent our ‘last’ such day on the calendar year, in Burundi.  (At least as MCC reps.)  MCC’s work is very cyclical on an annual schedule, and it is hard to believe we have done this 5 times already. 

The one good thing I will say about a job that has a very regular cycle of activities, is that, like the movie Groundhog Day, one theoretically gets better and better at it each time through.  Truth be told, I can say with some confidence that Rebecca and I understand the Rep. job here quite well. 

While some may imagine feeling antsy about being stuck in a fairly routine cycle of administrative tasks, my experience of doing this work is anything but routine.  In fact, the work has required an almost super-human capacity to improvise, adapt, and be extremely flexible.  It is exciting, unpredictable, and the thought of going through it for the last time is a bit sad.  (Not that we have a lot of time to process lots of feelings when we are in the throes of doing it.)

We had decided several years ago that 6 years would be the length of our commitment, after which we would return to the US so our kids (and us) could spend a couple years closer to grandparents before we go out again. 

But the thought of this coming to an end is daunting even though it is planned.  I did not expect to feel quite so fulfilled, significant, and a vital part of a vital community as I have in this extra-cultural context.  We have a good, meaningful life here and the thought of bringing it to a close is difficult.

This may all sound a bit premature with a full year remaining in our term, but 12 months goes by quickly and we will be needing to think about ending all the time as we will be preparing a turn-over manual for the next reps.  Everything we do this time needs to be recorded in a way that makes it comprehensible for the following year when we are not here.

Other things are making us aware of the end as well.  While we were in the US this last time we did do a bit of what was meant to be casual looking at houses in neighborhoods near our families.  As it turned out, we did find a house that we have put a bid on.  It is several blocks from Rebecca’s brother and my parents.  I don’t know if we will get it, but at this writing, our offer has been accepted.  Here is a picture. 

While this action might threaten to make us more antsy to leave, the surprising feeling is some fear about how on earth we could recreate the close community and significant work we have here.  We will be trusting God to open our eyes and hearts to embrace the opportunities of a new place when the time to leave comes. 

As I said earlier, our work here gives us mercifully little time to reflect of become self absorbed in melancholia.  We returned back into the maelstrom fairly quickly.

I last wrote in the wee hours before our departure from Dulles airport.  We took Ethiopian back which is two flights.  The first is 13 hours long without landing.  It is a strange feeling flight because of how rapidly we cross through time zones.  We start in the morning and land 12 hours later the following mornings.  The night is so short that neither Rebecca and I nor the kids had even fallen asleep before we landed.  But about the time we touched down we were dead tired and spent several hours in the crowded Addis Abeba airport trying to sleep on one small unoccupied lounging seat.  The last leg of the flight was shorter, Nairobi to Bujumbura, we did sleep a bit on that and arrived in the mid afternoon.  We were met by Felix who brought us back home.

Our house had been left in great condition by our house sitter and our dogs were thrilled to see us.  I remember little about the next two days except we spent a lot of them sleeping at very odd hours.  The kids were pretty mixed up but the fact that the sun goes down here at 6pm was a great help in getting them back to a regular schedule.

Two days after our arrival the recuperation period was over.  We had a lot to catch up on with Felix, but also, our three new one year service workers, the SALTers arrived on the Thursday Ethiopian flight.  (SALT stands for Serving and Learning Together)  This is the fourth year we have participated in the program so we have some familiarity with the drill.  Even so, it is a lot of prep work and even more when they actually arrive.

We need to find host families for them before they arrive as well as assignments.  When they get here we need to orient, get them set up with phones, internet modems, monetary advances, and many hours of orientation to the program, the culture, their host families, and their assignments. 

They come with a good attitude because those who choose to do this program know they are committing to a year of deep cultural immersion in language, lifestyle, and in their work setting with a local organization.  It is not a program for the faint of heart.   They know they will be stretched beyond most of their past life experiences and they have chosen to take it on.

Because of this, I do feel some excitement about seeing just who steps off the plane.  I also have done this enough to know that who steps back on the plane a year from now will be someone quite different and I have always been a bit awed by the change. 

SALTers Matt, Julia, Teresa, making a good impression by helping
around the kitchen on their first day!

So this year’s SALTers are Teresa, Julia, and Matt.  Teresa and Matt are Canadian, and Julia is American.  Matt will be working with a campus ministry partner in Burundi (UGBB-connected with Intervarsity).  Teresa and Julia will be working in Rwanda with several partners on a variety of projects.  They will all be doing the work of capacity building.  A job that becomes more and more defined the longer one is here. 

I picked them up from the airport and brought them home.

I have to take an aside here to talk about the latest ‘improvement’ at the airport:

We used to pay 300 bif (20cents) to enter the airport to park. We paid as we went in and got a receipt.  We showed the receipt when we left.  It was all done manually.  A guy handed me the receipt at the gate when I gave him money.  There was another person employed at the exit to look at the receipts as we left.  The whole process took about 30 seconds on each end.)

I think in the interest of increasing revenue (and efficiency) they have put in an automatic system in the month we were away, so it was quite a surprise to me.  The entrance is more or less the same, but instead of paying we get a ticket.  When we exit we put it in an automatic slot and pay the amount to go out the gate.

The problem is that the new automated system has some bugs.  The first one is that the place one inserts the ticket is about 25 feet off the road, so everyone has to exit the vehicle to enter the slot.  The second problem is that the amounts are all different and there needs to be a person in the booth giving change to everyone.   The third problem is that there is only one exit lane.    The fourth problem is that cars tend to trickle in to the airport but tend to leave en masse. 

The result is a level of chaos I can only describe as remarkable.  It took me about an hour to exit when we picked up the SALTers.  Cars were backed up at the gate quite far.  People would get out and make a line to pay, but it did not correspond in any way to the cars that were in line.  The person in the front of the line whose car was blocking the way was not often the first in the line to pay.  So this compounded the slowness.  The hour wait was honestly for less than 20 cars.  I was glad I had not had to pick them up from the crowded Brussels airlines flight which would have had one more passengers.

On top of this, in order to control the chaos, the airport had had to hire at least a half dozen more people.  Even exiting once you had a ticket was complicated because the place it had to be put to open the gat was also out of reach of the car on the other side of the road.  Someone had to help you do that part.

I try to so hard to not let the cynical tongue clicking side of me react to this scene.  But sitting in a hot car while drivers are doing their best to cut in front of you and the whole thing seems entirely pointless and avoidable if some thought had been applied, tries me.  I will say, this kind of inappropriate technology can usually be traced back to some great idea by a foreign donor like the World Bank or IMF.  I don’t know who suggested this be implemented, but I would be happy if someone would shed some light in a comment.

I do have some smug satisfaction in the expectation that when the automatic payment machine breaks down in the next month, the whole thing will be abandoned and we will be able to pay a person who will give us a chit when we enter.  (I would happily pay much more going in to avoid the current catastrophe).

Whew, a lengthy diversion, but I think being able to write about it helps me  to let it go more easily.  I may not be a genius, but I do hope that I can help our local partners not make similar kinds of mistakes in planning that I witnessed at the airport exit boondoggle. 

We have spent several days in Bujumbura with the SALTers and got Matt set up with his host family.  The SALTers did have a chance to meet our other Burundi service workers, Melody, and Jennifer, during their few days in Bujumbura as they were both in town on the weekend.  We even celebrated Melody's Birthday with her on Saturday.  

I am finishing this blog in Kigali as we are now here bringing the Rwanda SALTers to meet their supervisors and host families as well.  We will be here getting them set up and taking care of business until Friday.  We will drive home through Mutaho and see the Hope School on the way home.  Our whole family came this time as the kids do not have school until Monday.  It can be challenging to travel together, but our partners like to see the family.

We got here in the evening and did see Matt Gates who is looking well.  He has been working hard in training groups to do conservation agriculture and gave us a very good report on the progress of the project that we began in July.  At this writing it is under-budget and ahead of schedule!! (I hope I haven’t jinxed it.)

A Few of My Favorite Things

David fishing off the pier at Charter Hall.  --I love the reflection.                                        "The idea of America.”  I first encountered the phrase in Grad. School in a course on American Pragmatic philosophy.   The professor was an African American man, a protégé of Cornell West of Harvard.  What was refreshing was approaching this inquiry without a hint of cynicism and we sought to understand this uniquely American philosophy and the intellectual tradition that has shaped our national values and understanding of ourselves. 

hiking at Oregon ridge, MD

I guess I am reflecting on this because I am once again approaching the final hours of my time here in the US as we continue to pack and get things ready for our departure at 6 am tomorrow morning from Dulles airport to return to Burundi.  I am stealing a bit of time from packing to get something down while I still have fast internet.  I have only written one previous entry about our 4 weeks here, which left us in Kansas City where I was enjoying a family reunion with the Hawkins’ (my mom’s extended family.)

When I came, I had made a mental list of things I wanted to make sure to do or experience when I was here.  There were only 4 things that I have found truly lacking in Burundi.  They were

1)   sushi

2)   mint chip ice cream

3)   honey crisp apples 

4)   one hour crime dramas on TV (like Law and Order)

Still know how to grill!

I expanded the list a bit to include fresh grilled salmon, and Maryland sweet corn once I got here and remembered how much I enjoyed them.  Our capacity to forget the things we loved over time is surprising but probably important in order to adapt to change.  In fact, I am so used to Burundi now that there are things I am missing more there and look forward to returning to. 

I am not going to be able, in a short entry to list all of the things we did chronologically, but in the spirit of recalling the highlights and trying to capture in some way what my own idiosyncratic 'idea of America' is, as one who has been absent for a while, I will make a list here and try to explain the significance of each entry.

1) Wiffleball— There was an experience that refreshed, briefly, my fading great memories of childhood.   One night, toward the end of our KC week when my kids, and brother’s kids went out on the front lawn of the Aunt Binny’s farm house and played wiffle ball.  The parents were sort of the permanent outfield while the kids took turns batting and running bases.  There were, of course, ghost runners, ‘pitchers mound poison’, and other rules that have not changed since I had played.   The best part of it was the time of day.  Wiffleball is best played in the extended twilight of a summer’s evening, with fireflies in the outfield.  The game can easily extend to 9:30 pm before the ball becomes unbattable. 

2)  Fishing--  The kids had some limited experience of this in Burundi with some friends, but going out to the pond on Bill and Binnie’s farm and casting our night crawlers and getting a perch on almost every cast was quite gratifying, especially for the kids.  None of them was over 5 inches so we threw them all back, but David really got hooked and practiced casting in the driveway when we got back to Baltimore quite a bit.  I bought the kids 2 zebco closed faced spinning reels and short rods and we fished a couple more times in Maryland.  We will be taking the fishing equipment back to Burundi this year, but fishing in Lake Tanganyika does not feel the same as standing in the tall grass by a farm pond in the Midwest.

3) Roller Coasters—We did go to one Amusement Park while we were home.  It was fun to let our kids experience something of this nature for the first time.  Worlds of Fun is in Kansas City and it is excellent, extremely well maintained, and one I remember going to when I was a teenager.  We had a dream day when we went--a bit overcast, not too sunny, midweek so there were no crowds.  As a kid it would have been the perfect day for me, one could walk from one ride to another and be at the front of the line for each one.   Oren and his cousin loved the spinning ride where the floor dropped out and did that 4 times in a row.  (Once was more than enough for me.)

There I participated in a very meaningful father-son rite of passage.  Oren had been to a Baptist  Bible school camp the previous week which used roller coasters as a theme for overcoming fear.  (Colossal Coaster World)  He was very keen on going on a real roller coaster after hearing about them.  (He had never seen a real one until this trip.)  He is 8 and met the minimal height requirement so I agreed to take him on the “Prowler”. an older wooden one that was apparently the fastest in the world in the 1980’s.  We went together and it was about as loud and fast and scary as one could want.  I will not forget the expression on his face when we got off.  He was truly terrified and swore he would never do it again--for about an hour, then he began convincing himself that it was not that bad, and soon wanted to go back for another turn.  We had to leave as the day was coming to an end, but we did have a really good together that day.  (I would have bought the picture of us that they snapped but they wanted $12 so I passed.)

4) Museums—We did go to many museums, including a Science museum in Kansas City, and the aquarium in Baltimore.  The museums that have the most significance though are the Railroad museum in downtown Baltimore and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.  Both of these museums remind me of childhood but particularly the latter.  I remember numerous trips to Washington DC to see the museum with the elephant in the entrance and the giant blue whale hanging in the ocean exhibit.  I was also a budding geologist and loved the rock and mineral exhibit, especially the gems, featuring the Hope Diamond.  It is all still there, although there are some changes and it has been spruced up considerably.  Our kids see this as a tradition now as well and were very excited to return this year.

5)  Playgrounds—The best things in life are free, in the US that is.  We frequented several playgrounds—there is one near my parent’s house and another near Rebecca’s parents' house.  There is a creek near the one behind my parents house where you can turn over rocks and catch crawdads, a skill I did my best to teach David, our critter lover.  It was also fun for us to go out and watch soccer practice of our kids’ cousin Miriam.  It is so amazing to see such well maintained public play spaces, with picnic tables, ample parking, and grass on the playing field.

Church—I don’t see why anyone would not want to spend Sunday morning in a church here.   Suburban churches are such bright, clean, aesthetically pleasing places.  My personal preference is an older building with wood pews and red carpeting down the center, a pipe organ and a balcony in the back.  Taking the kids to a welcoming well equipped clean Sunday School class where they are greeted by a friendly competent teacher is a real joy.  US services are so well timed!  Never more than an hour and a half.  We went and visited 3 churches while we were here, Valley Baptist where my parents go, Long Green Valley Church of the Brethren, (Rebecca’s parents), and North Baltimore Mennonite where Rebecca’s brother and sister and we are members.  I did preach once, at Valley Baptist and had a chance to talk about how the experience of Elijah as an exile parallels the experience of some of our brothers and sisters in Burundi.  (Note to PUMC—sorry we could not get up to New York this year, will try to see you next year.)

Charter Hall—This retreat center, in the form of a hunting lodge and dock house (no longer used for hunting) is a long standing Sack family tradition that I have married into and enjoyed for the past 10 years.  It is located on an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay and is probably as close as one can come to the ‘idea of Maryland’ as possible.  It is rustic, and features plenty of space for relationship building and reflection.  Activities are campish--horseshoes, canoeing, fishing, swimming.  We had some friends from New York join us while we are there, Don and Rosaura with their kids Gabriela and Raphael came and spent a weekend with us.  We also had some friends of the family up for a meal.  It was very relaxing and meaningful, especially since we were not able to get up to NY to see our friends there this year.

Mowing Lawns—I jumped at the opportunity to mow 4 times while I was back.  It is said that the olfactory senses are the most directly connected to memory.  The aroma of fresh mowed grass and gasoline on a Saturday morning smells like America to me. 

Friends and Family-- We had a lot of time with cousins.  It is hard to explain the relationship between cousins.  The ones around my age were always like my best friends though I rarely saw them more than once per year.  Whenever we were together it was like we had always known each other.  David and Oren had an extra week with Fletcher, his cousin from Nashville who spent a week with us in Baltimore.  Miriam and Gabriel live here and our kids loved to go over to their house whenever they could.

We also have so many friends here that have known us since our youth in Baltimore.  (Rebecca and I) as we had grown up in the same community (the International Health Community) for much of our lives.  Seeing friends of my parents that we have known from childhood was very special.  (They do follow this blog so I am going to give a shout out to: Louise, Charlene, and Jo especially!)

The list could go on.  Much of it is Summery, because that is the time that we have been here the past 5 years.  Winter is a season that has become more and more hazy to me.  I barely own a long sleeve shirt much less a sweater now.  But summers in the US give me the most images of what my Idea of America is.  Perhaps because, as a third culture kid myself, most of my memories of my childhood here are from that time. 

This year is a bit different though.  Unlike past years, this is the last year we will be coming back for a visit.  Next summer we return for good.  We will have completed our MCC assignment in Burundi at the end of July 2014.  It made this summer feel a bit different.  I have not, in the past, been projecting into the future, thinking about where we might live, what we might do.  It was honestly a bit unsettling.  It is hard to feel excited about it right now since our whole life is in Burundi.  The unknowns in the US make me more nervous than the knowns in Burundi.  Right now, the US is a nice place to visit, but we don’t live there, it does not feel like home.

It is late now and I need to help finish packing.  There is so much more to say.  It was great, but I am glad it is over.  There is just too much to do here.  Too much to see to many people to meet.  Like a delicious Indian buffet with too many entrees, I overdid it and now I feel too full--sort of have a stomach ache.  I hope, when I move back I will remember how to restrain myself with so many choices here.  Remembering how to be selective will be a challenge when we move back for good.