Background

Hey all. I'm aware that the background of the blog is not as it should be at the moment. The same sweet friend who created how the page this last time around has sweetly offered to work on it for me...for which I am greatly thankful.

I leave Africa in less than 48 hours, flying up to Geneva. I leave from there on August 6th. I can't promise much blogging until then, but hopefully I might have some stories to share after that! :)

Figuring out Jericho in the Medina

Today was one of those I-love-it-here-and-the-thought-of-leaving-makes-me-want-to-cry type days. I'd stayed up late last night thoroughly enjoying the neighborhood wedding music, and somehow blissfully was able to sleep almost 8 hours straight, despite the sunlight basking into my room. A good night's sleep is a gift from the Lord!

Mrs. Real McCoy and I headed out this morning to the medina. The medina, you may remember, is a quite market/bazaar/souq built in the oldest part of town where the streets are so narrow that it's pedestrian only. A giant maze filled with tourists, shoppers, shop keepers all pushing their way through the sensory overload of sights, sounds, and smells. I've always loved places like this no matter what country I'm in, and here is no different.

I'm leaving here in just 11 days, and so now the time has begun to purchase souvenirs, gifts, and stones of remembrance. I'm actually going to go with Teacher to the medina this next week to purchase things, but I wanted to go today and scope out what I wanted to buy so that she and I could get right to it when we go together. So...Mr. Real McCoy offered to spend the day with their toddler so that Mrs. Real McCoy could go and enjoy some female shopping time. We had a blast talking to shop keepers--shocking them that we are learning the local dialect of arabic (instead of modern standard arabic)--and trying our hand at bartering.

We went into one store, and this man, Ali, told us that we could go up onto the rooftop of their building to see the whole medina from above. While we were there, they gave us some traditional mint tea, let us sit in the cool, air conditioned room where they sell their rugs, and practice our arabic with them. It was such a delightful experience. You can see pictures of the rooftop view HERE.

Mrs. Real McCoy is pregnant, and so it seemed like, with all the heat and walking, that maybe we ought to get some food. Shoot...I'm not pregnant, and I was ready for food! We asked Ali where we could find some food in the medina, and he gave us specific directions to get to a "great traditional restaurant." We found it easily, and stood in the doorway checking it out.

I noticed a table with some other foreigners, several of which were women, so I figured it wasn't a "men's only" type restaurant...which they have here. (Coffee shops, mostly). The waiter ushered us in and asked us what we wanted to eat.

"Do you have a menu?"

"No. Well...here." He handed us an arabic-only menu. While we can read arabic, we read it at about a 1st grade level, and without our teacher to help us, we knew that menu would not help us. We handed it back.

"Do you have schwarma?"

"No."

"Do you have kebab?"

"No."

"Do you have brick?"

"No."

"What do you have?"

"Merguez (spicy sausage), and ....abunchofstuffthatwedidn'tknowwhatitwas."

"Merguez, then, with fries."

He brought us our merguez, fries, and a vegetable side dish they serve often here, and we dug in pretty fast, famished as we were. About half way through the meal, Mrs. McCoy looked around us, and leaned over.

"We're the only women in here. There are 40 men, all local, no tourists, and the two of us women." I looked around...sure enough, she was right. I remembered the time that KO had accidently got us on the men-only metro in Cairo, and just laughed to myself. I suppose the women we'd seen earlier when we'd arrive were clueless foreigner women just like us. We were halfway through our meal...what could we do? Honestly, the men didn't seem to care. We finished eating, paid the waiter, and left.

Thanks, Ali, for directing the two of us foreigner women to a men's only local restaurant. It was good...but I won't be eating there again.

While eating lunch, Mrs. Real McCoy asked what I'd learned during my almost four months here, and why did I think that God brought me here for such a time as this? (We've been studying Esther with a group of other expatriate ladies.) On a day that was as perfect as this, it is hard to understand why God is having me leave, and to trust Him in it. I love it here, and feel like I'm just reaching the time when the hardness of culture shock is wearing off (maybe I've sweat all of it out?), and I'm settling into a groove and a happiness here.

It would be easy to say, "I don't want to leave." My fleshly desire doesn't want to at all. But something I saw this week was that I cannot stay in a place simply because I love it there, because it's fun, and easy, and pleasant. (Pause, wait a second! Did I just say that living in north Africa as a single female was easy? Was pleasant? What? Yes...and I really mean it.) I need to be where He wants me to be...and that, for the time being, is still France.

I wrote awhile back about how God has brought me out of my desert wanderings, to Gilgal, and that when I arrived here He showed me that now is a time to conquer my promised land. As I am preparing to leave, it's clear that these four months here in North Africa were my battle of Jericho. Just one small step of beginning the conquering. Of taking one step at a time, walking daily, and trusting that He would knock the wall of my hard heart down in time.

This first battle has honestly been the deepest, richest, most trust building, and amazing time of my life. I wonder if the wandering Children, after many more battles of conquering their land, looked back and thought, "Do you remember when we took Jericho? We just walked around the walls, and they came tumbling down." I'm sure it was an awesome memory for them. So these four months here will be for me. I just took quiet little steps of faith and He crashed all the walls I'd built up against Him until I could fall easily, joyfully, gratefully into the promised inheritance of daily relationship with Him. I wish I could make a few more laps around these walls, but apparently, God thought four months was all that this battle would take.

So while I don't want to leave, and I love here, and days like to today will make July 28th a bit harder... the time has come to leave. I will do so joyfully and with thanksgiving, "for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or questioning..." (Philippians 2:13-14). I won't grumble about His will and I won't question it either. I am content to return to my beloved France, but even more so...looking forward to march on to the next battle He has for me.

You know you're in Africa in the summer when...

• it's so hot you decide to clean the fridge, just so you have an acceptable excuse for sitting in front of it with the door open.
• killing cockroaches on a daily basis is just a normal part of the day.
• you take multiple showers daily to cool off.
• 4pm is the quietest, stillest hour on the continent because everyone is napping.
• you contemplate sleeping in the bathtub filled with cool water until you remember that drowning is not worth cooling off.
• you wake up to drums, you fall asleep to drums, and you begin to think in drum beats...wedding season means drum season.
• you live off of cereal, yogurt, fresh fruit and vegetables, and various salads...because it's too hot out to eat anything hot.
• you contemplate sleeping on the roof or balcony because it's cooler outside at night than inside, until you remember that mosquito bites and cockroaches crawling on you is not worth cooling off.
• you see women carrying buckets on their heads to provide some semblance of shade.
• even the "cold" water coming out of the pipes is warm because the water tank is hot from being in the sun.
• it takes your laundry about 20 minutes to dry out on the line.

I've been hearing from folks in the states and France that it's hot elsewhere than here. That makes sense...it is the middle of July. And I can't complain, because we had an abnormally cool June here, and so it was quite pleasant long past when it should have been hot already. It is, however, hot now.

And while it may actually be hotter where you are in the US... I don't have air conditioning. I leave my hot apartment to walk for 35 minutes through 100 degree weather to my language school, which thankfully does have air conditioning. By the time I have cooled off and re-hydrated, it's time to walk 35 minutes again back through the 100 degree weather to my hot apartment, where I do nothing the entire rest of the day but lay in front of the fan dreaming up ideas of how I can cool off.

It's supposed to be 105 on Thursday. Praise God! I always tell people who complain about heat that dead people are cold and clammy. So, if you're hot and sweaty, at least you know you're alive. :) I have been enjoying the heat, actually, even if that translates me into not doing anything but lying in front of the fan all afternoon.

I've gotten used to killing the cockroaches. (Can't say I'm enjoying that, though.) I'm even starting to dig the daily drum beats from all the weddings in the neighborhood. So, I'm starting to find that (except for the cockroaches), summer in Africa is actually quite pleasant.

Ze Nude Home

I'm going to start by saying that ARABIC IS HARD. I have a deep respect for anyone who has ever learned it. Deep, deep respect.

This month, the Real McCoy's and I are taking a language intensive course that, inshallah, should push out of the novice level and into intermediate. Inshallah...and that's a big inshallah because my brain still feels full and wants to reject all new information.

Teacher is teaching us body parts and grammatical patterns that can be found when adding possessive endings to the words. That translates: We're learning how to say, "my hand, your hand, his hand, her hand, our hands, yall's hands, their hands." ETC.

Since ARABIC IS HARD, we've been doing about 3 body parts a day until we'd finally figured out the patterns and mastered them. So you can understand how hard: we're in class three hours a day, and we were learning 3 body parts a day. No, it didn't take us a full hour to learn one body part. It took 45 minutes, and the rest of the time we spent simply describing what we'd done the evening before. Because it really does take me 15 minutes to say, "It was so hot I couldn't do anything but watch a dvd."

Today, however, we must have finally proved that we'd mastered the system, because Teacher wrote the entire rest of the list of body parts that we hadn't learned yet up on the board for us to copy down into our notebooks. A million words. Thank you, Teacher. We each took turns adding possessives. My cheek, your cheek, his cheek, her cheek, etc.

When it came to my turn, I had to do the word for "upperarm," which is z.nood. I started with "my upper arms," and said, "ze.nood.ee." And then I giggled, and so did Mr. Real McCoy. We both thought that it sounded funny. Without even thinking anything further than that, we just thought the sound was silly and it made us giggle.

But Teacher asked why it sounded funny. Mrs. Real McCoy said it sounded like "snooty" to her, and that all made us giggle a little more. Then she added that it also sounded like "nude," which made us all giggle even more.

I continued, "you upper arms," -- ze.nood.ek. More laughter.

"His upper arms," -- ze.nood.oo. Laughter is becoming almost incontrollable at this point.

By the time I got to "their upper arms," --ze.nood.hom-- We were all howling with laughter. We'd lost it. So much language plus the summer heat had gone to our heads and made us baffy. But then Mrs. Real McCoy did us in. She said, "It sounds like a French person talking about a nudist's house."

Ze nude home.

I seriously have not laughed that hard since I've been in Africa. All four of us had tears in our eyes. I was doubled over. Oh my goodness. Laughter like that is good for the soul and much needed when learning Arabic.

Because ARABIC IS HARD.

Happy 4th of July!

Do you remember those teachers who would say "There's no such thing as a stupid question"? I had friends in the US who would write to me while I was in Portugal who seemed determined to prove those teachers wrong. They'd ask me (about Portugal) things like:

• What's it like living in a 3rd world country?
• What's it like living south of the equator?
• How's your Spanish coming along?
• Do they have fireworks on the 4th of July?

I've come a long way in being graceful when people ask me questions about whatever country I happen to be in. I guess I've learned along the way that I don't know everything about every country and so I probably have asked some pretty good ones too to my friends that are in places completely foreign to me.

So...no, they don't have fireworks in Portugal on the 4th of July. In France, they DO have fireworks and parades and everything decked out in red, white, and blue on the 14th of July (their independence day), and it's close enough to the 4th and similar enough that I never felt like I was missing out on the 4th.

And I don't feel like I missed out today. If you're wondering how I celebrated the 4th (maybe a better way to phrase the question than the way mentioned above), I'm happy to tell you.

There are some Americans here who work for an oil company, and the company provides them with a HUMONGOUS house on top of a hill right near the beach. The family, however, is currently in the states on vacation, but offered the house to the rest of us Americans to use for a 4th party. A million of us showed up, played in the pool all afternoon long, grilled burgers, lit sparklers, played pro-America music (yes, someone had an awesome pro-America playlist on the ipod), and just had a jolly good ole time. There was even homemade apple pie.

While we were sitting around, Mrs. Real McCoy asked someone how they typically celebrated their 4th in the states. She thought about it, and then responded, "Well, I think the last time I was there for the 4th was 2002." I got to thinking of my own journey...

2010: Africa

2009: France

2008: France

2007: France

2006: Washington, D.C. (awesome)

2005: The Emirates

2004: India

2003: North Carolina

2002: Sri Lanka

2001: Just returned home from Portugal...maybe I'd been home 3 days?

2000: Portugal

1999: About to get on a plane to Portugal

So when I first thought about it, I lumped 1999 and 2001 in with the overseas celebrations...and then remembered that my coming and going to Portugal had been sandwiched by the 4th. So I hadn't spent quite as many 4th's overseas as I'd originally thought...but I've still spent quite a few abroad in the last 10 years or so.

Anyway, Americans typically know how to celebrate the 4th wherever they are. I've never felt like I've missed out (except maybe in 2003 while working camp in NC). Honestly, I'm more sad about missing Bastille Day in France just 10 days from now. I love the festive spirit and the fireworks are insane!

I hope yall have a great day celebrating the freedom of our country. I also hope you get a nice relaxing day by the pool with grilled burgers just like I did. There was even a lawn with GRASS. For a moment, I forgot I was in Africa...

1000 Healths

I just sent out an email about "Saha!" (Health). If you did not receive it, and you read this blog, leave me a comment with your email address, and I'll send it to you. I just didn't want to post that story here, but it follows as the next story from the wedding.