2009 in photos - march (but not really)

apparently i didn't take any pictures in march... so here is a picture of my beautiful friend allison when she visited in december. we went to the beach by boat with some of my friends on christmas day, and we came back to the city as the sun was setting. very nice memory. having one of my best friends here for the holiday was the best gift ever! i will never forget it.

allison got married on august 1, and i couldn't be there, but i thought of her all day. funny enough, i was at dinner with some friends on her wedding day, and they asked about her and how she was doing. i looked at my the time on my phone and said "she's a married woman now. let the dream die." :) congrats allison. love you lots!

2009 in photos - february

quite a while back, chris started inviting the lighthouse peeps to the beach every saturday morning to play ultimate frisbee. it used to be football (soccer to the americans) but i think they were ruining the balls every other week, so that got kinda expensive after a while... anyway, at first the kids weren't so sure about the whole frisbee thing. but once they got the hang of it, they were addicted. so now they go every saturday unless it is pouring rain.

i don't play sports with the boys because they think of me like a sister, but our mom isn't around to tell them not to hurt me... get the point? they are what we might call "competitive" and also what we might call "much stronger than this wimpy white girl." anyway, i never used to go, but in february i started to. i just watch and enjoy being by the water and hanging out with the kids who aren't playing. this picture was taken one saturday, and i will not name the kid, but i will tell you that he is one of my favorite kids on the planet earth. with that said, many of you will know who this is. isn't he a heart-breaker!?!

2009 in photos - january

we had visitors from WMF romania in january, and they helped me celebrate my birthday! this photo was taken in a poda-poda on my last day as a 27-year-old. we were on our way to the best beach in the world (river number 2!!!) where we enjoyed pepper chicken a-la-florence and chocolate cake. :)

pictured left to right: poda-poda apprentice, cami's neck, chris, aunty sally, george, noah, david, faye's forehead, me. unpictured: erin, keyara, florence, lenuta, magda, fanel, and poda-poda driver.

staring blankly again...

i felt the urge to write something today, but now i'm staring at the screen again. hmmmm.

i guess i'll just tell you what has been going on since i returned to freetown. this is what i just wrote in my board report that was due this week (it can only be a maximum of 2 pages, so this is a pretty brief synopsis);

I returned to Freetown in mid-July after 3 months away from the field. We left for camp 4 days later and I spent the week dealing with the most intense culture-shock I’ve ever experienced. The following week we did a work-project with a church in Kroo Bay, and it was so fun that I wish we did it every year. And after that I had exactly 2 weeks to get my ducks in a row for the Servant Team who arrived on August 16. They are a great group and are adjusting very well. They have been very giving and very entertaining already.

so that's what has been going on for the last 6 weeks. busy busy.

i wish i had something interesting to say... this post was boring for even me. sorry. more soon!

words and words and fish-balls

i promise you i go to this blog at least every 2 weeks, open a window for a new post, stare at it for a few minutes, and tell myself i'll write another time. i don't know what it is, but i just find myself without words. always without words. i still love writing, but there has been some sort of block on my brain for the last year... don't worry, there is still plenty going on up there ;-) i'm just not finding the words to let it all out. and when i do find words, i'm not usually willing to share them. i don't know...

i actually think that this is good in some ways. i kinda feel like i used to write for validation as much as for any other reason. i wanted to be affirmed for what i was doing, wanted people to know i was smart, wanted people to hear all of the important things i had to say. i don't feel that way about my words anymore. i really don't. i think i have lost my pretense in my old age. i don't care so much what people think about what i'm doing. i don't think i'm all that smart. and i don't think i have anything to say that is more important than what anyone else could say about life, love, God... we're all just doing the best we can in the place where we find ourselves. i guess the "place i find myself" might seem a bit more interesting or exotic than the mid-west, but after 2 years in freetown, it mostly just feels like the city where i live. the things that used to seem so foreign that i HAD TO write about them are no longer so shocking... i'm sure if i wrote them down they would get a laugh, but honestly, i don't even notice the chickens in church, or the watchman peeing off of my veranda in the mornings. i guess my indifference is as funny as the thing itself, huh?

i'm quickly approaching my 2nd anniversary with this crazy city. i can't believe it! time seems to have flown by, but i know that i am a much different person than i was when i arrived. this makes me happy and sad in the same moment. while i have grown up and matured in so many ways that i probably can't even name them all, i know that i have sacrificed a great deal of my idealism to this place. freetown isn't kind to dreamers. i do believe that this place could use a few more hopeful people to believe in its potential, but being one of those hopeful ones often feels like a willful plank-walk. you believe because want to, but you know - save a miracle - it isn't going to get you anywhere good.

like i said, a lot has changed in the last 2 years. maybe that is why i have had so much trouble with words. you kinda have to know what you think about something before you can tell anyone what you think. one of my very most favoritest books is "till we have faces" by c.s. lewis. the climax of the book comes to mind now;

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

i do hope to find ways to say what is going on. and i hope that writing it all down will help me remember the things that do make this season of my life so interesting and valuable. there is no time like the present, right?! i want to hold it with 2 hands, look it square in the eye, and find the lessons and laughs that wait for me here. thanks for continuing to check in on me. i'll try to come around this page more often ...

one short story, just for a laugh: my third servant team arrived last sunday and we've spent this week roaming the city and having lots and lots of orientation meetings. yesterday we made lunch at my house and one of the guys was asking about something that he ate the night before with his host family. he said that they had a variety of fried things - fish, chicken, plantains, dough balls - with a spicy sauce over it and it was all really good. i told him that meal is aptly named fry-fry and is one of my favorite meals here. (you know what i health nut i am...) he was unsure of something he ate and described that it had a meat-like texture but tasted like seafood. i asked him if it was shaped like a ball. he said yes. i told him it was probably a fish-ball. he looked suprised and said "really?! but those were some pretty big balls for a fish!"

he was serious. i still can't get over it.

to sum up an entire year...

...would be impossible. but, i am making an honest and zealous attempt to jump back into the blog world. i realize that people kinda wonder if i'm still alive when i don't tell them that i'm still alive. so i'm going to try and let you in on my world on a regular basis again.

so, in honor of my return, i gave the blog a face-lift. one reason for my long absence was that i really truly don't know what to say most of the time. everything feels heavy and very difficult to communicate. i feel like freetown has changed me- so much sometimes that it feels a bit misleading to still be called 'stephanie', you know? so while i'm not about to go through the hastle of a legal name-change, i thought it would be appropriate to rearrange my little corner of the WWW.

the poem that you now see at the top of my page is a relatively new favorite. i have kristina and ben to thank for it. they were members of my first servant team (could it really have been a YEAR ago???) and they gave me a letter with this poem before they left freetown. it was like rilke (and kristina) had read my soul. and each time i read the words, it resounds deeply in me. so i thought, why not name my page after it?

i am the dove outside. i hope that my won-back heart can be satisfied: free through all it has given up. my soul fills my chest differently now - heavier by the weight of where i have been...

things i should and shouldn't tell you

the boss of one of my friends here is a lebanese Christian who thinks that all american missionaries work for the CIA. that's right. i am the jason bourne of freetown. anyway, shortly after he made this accusation i signed in on facebook and most of the adverts on my page were in arabic and i had invitations to join some lebanese political groups. so i was like, "oh yeah? who's the spy now?!?" and sometimes i jokingly call my lebanese friends "terrorists." just in jest. it's light-hearted fun. well, 2 minutes ago when i checked my blog, the page was in arabic. yeah. saw the 2 boxes where you are supposed to put your sign-in name and your password. but i, of course, put them in the wrong places because, well, arabic goes left to right. so i tried again, and then once i signed in i saw english... anyway, it looks like my cover is blown and now they're just messing with my head.

okay so, here are some stories that i swore i would never tell my mom, but now that they are in the distant past, i think they're are slightly amusing. sorry mom.

a few months ago was supposed to go out to one of the refugee camps with florence and erin. the day kinda boxed up and we left a bit later than we planned to, and i hadn't had time to eat all morning. we had to take one kind of transport to get to another kind of transport and florence kept telling me i needed to eat something, but i'm stubborn and i kept saying i would just get a plate of rice once we got to the camp since we were already late. this was right when it was getting really hot after the rains ended, and the sun was in full force. we ended up sitting in traffic for over an hour without moving a mile, and by then it was too late to go to the camp since we wouldn't get back until late and the east end of the city isn't somewhere you really want to be late at night. so we got down from the bus and started walking back toward town. i needed to stop at a friend's shop to pick something up, so the girls came with me. as soon as we reached, i started to feel sick. i told erin i needed some water and i sat down. then my friend looks at me and says "oh no. what's wrong with you? you're yellow!" so i ask to go to the bathroom. he shows me to the back of the store. i enter the bathroom, the room starts to spin, i think i'm going to die, i leave the bathroom because i don't want to die alone, i fall down in the hallway, lay there for a minute while everyone runs to see what happened, i gain enough strength to run back to the bathroom and throw up, then i started to feel better. they force-fed me 2 candy bars and 2 liters of water before they let me go home. so... the moral of this story is, you are never too busy to eat when it is 95 degrees and insanely humid. i learned my lesson. please don't lecture me.

the next story is a bit more disturbing. i'll spare the frightening details, and beef up the more entertaining ones... i think this happened in october... me and faye and our friends nicole and samir were walking on the beach one friday after work. we got caught up talking to some other friends and it started to get dark before we got back to samir's jeep. well, being the very smart girls that we are, nicole and i started to lag behind faye and samir (who is tall and manly and the kind of guy you want to keep up with if you are at lumley beach when it is getting dark). nicole pulls out her camera because we wanted to laugh at a picture she took earlier of samir (tall and manly) imitating the way faye walks (bouncy and girly). so yeah, 2 girls, lumley beach at dusk, nice digital camera. before we knew it, a guy runs up behind us and tries to take the camera out of nicole's hand. she refuses to let go (she's a very petite little thing too) and ends up getting thrown on the ground by the guy (who honestly wasn't much bigger than she was). anyway, being bigger than both of them, i started shoving the guy as hard as i possibly can. this doesn't sound funny, but it was a little bit because i had my rainbow sandals in my hands and i have a feeling those might cause a sting if you were hit in the face with them, which he was. so there's nicole laying between us in the fetal position with her camera, this little (yet strong) man bent down trying to get the camera with one hand and blocking blows from me and my sandals with the other hand. it was really pretty scary, but he didn't get the camera (even after another guy showed up to help) and i'm pretty sure they had friends watching who will never let them forget that they couldn't get a camera away from those 2 american girls. faye and samir did run back to help us too. i'm actually pretty sure that those guys would have gotten the camera had it not been for faye and samir. i think nicole and i managed for those first 30 seconds on just instinct alone, but once we realized what happened, we were crazy. she was really upset (who wouldn't be?) and i was just mad. so yeah, another lesson learned. and don't worry, i'm too paranoid now to let anything similar happen again. i'm pretty sure i shouldn't have told you this story...

people have asked about a mailing address and a phone number. mail is a funny thing here, and i'm still waiting on a few letters that i know were mailed 4 months ago. but faye did receive some Christmas packages - she received them after Christmas, but she received them. so, it's a gamble, but here is my address:

PO Box 545
Freetown, Sierra Leone
WEST AFRICA

and i use the phone company that does the best job of receiving international calls, but they're not perfect. you might have to try a couple of times to get through. if you are calling from the US, my mobile number is:

011-232-76-23-44-88

oh! and my birthday was nice and i spent it at the beach. this is the first birthday i remember not needing a winter coat... but it was nice. and not as painful as i expected. :) i'm dramatic, i know.

love love love you all.

i'm on a roll

that's right folks, only one week later and you're hearing from me again.

i don't know what's gotten into me! maybe it's the fact that we have electricity and i'm able to write from the comfort of my own kitchen table. maybe it's the fact that we have electricity and i'm able to sleep to the soothing whir and breeze from my very own FAN. maybe it's the fact that we have electricity and i'm able to start my day with a glass of COLD water from our fridge that makes things COLD. my friends, life is good.

i recieved quite a few responses to my last post which made me realize something... i live in africa. my life is interesting. funny things happen to me every single day and after only 4 months, they seem normal. i actually went back and read that post after reading the responses and i laughed at it myself. i do have some unique stories to share. so i'm honestly going to try to be better. i think that i've been waiting around for some big earth-shaking insight that the world must know, but really, we all just want to laugh at the white girl in africa. that's what all of my neighbors want, so why should i think you're any different? :)

so, for your reading pleasure, here are a couple of notes from my time tutoring in the afternoons... both of these stories involve snack time, so it would appear that they just come here and eat, but i promise that we learn every once in a while too.

a few weeks ago the 3 regulars were sitting at the table eating egg sandwiches, and they were making a MESS as usual. they don't eat at a table in their house, so even when one is available they don't use it. so little saidu is sitting with his legs up on the arm of the chair, his plate on his lap, food flying in every direction... he stood up, and there were crumbs ALL OVER his chair. and this is when i made my first real language error. i've made mistakes, sure. but i've never made an offensive mistake. so to make that kind of mistake in front of children... ouch. it's really not fair, because the polite way of referring to a person's back side in english, is to call it just that - their "back side." what i didn't know is this - that is pretty much the MOST offensive way to refer to it in Krio. does that seem fair to you? so i made some comment about food and his backside and saidu and mari start laughing. mari was in tears. saidu just staring at me laughing with his eyes WIDE like i had absolutely made his day. and then there's remie... "auntie steph, you done cuss." so serious and sober. while the others are crying. he told them that they should correct me first, then laugh. which i enjoyed. anyway, completely embarrassing. i apologized to remie, then saidu yells "i'm the one you cussed!" so they laughed again. moral of the story, be careful with krio. i've said it before and i'll say it again; it's just close enough to english to really get you into trouble.

last week the kids didn't have school but i told the boys to come at 3 when i finished my krio lesson. at 3:30 on friday i called noah to ask where they were so he sent them and they reached my house at 4. (i thought i had a fluid sense of time...) we only had an hour before i had to be somewhere else, so i decided i would just give them some ginger cookies and tea - no sandwich. well, then they told me that they hadn't eaten that day, which i didn't really believe, but i sent remie to buy some bananas anyway just in case they really were hungry. long story short, cami overhears them tell me that they hadn't eaten, she sees noah that afternoon and asks him if it's true. of course, it isn't. we decide that as punishment for lying, they won't get a snack at my house this week. so i saw saidu the next day and asked, "my friend, what happened yesterday?" he responds, in a very quiet voice with his eyes to the ground, "something very wrong." it has never been so easy to forgive someone. :)

and hillary, you won't believe this, but i haven't fallen down or tripped in a really long time! my reflexes and night vision are greatly improving. however, last week i was walking to the youth center and all of these people were saying to me "osh ya" and "take time white girl" and i started to realize that they must have thought i was someone else who HAD fallen on that corner... i never figured it out, but even when i stay upright, i get credit for falling. forced humility.

i turn 27 next week. gross. i'll try to have fun anyway, and i'll let you know what i do to dull the pain of reaching my LATE 20'S...

a couple of months later...

well, well, well. here i am again. i don te.

it would appear that i have vanished from the face of the earth, but the truth is that i really haven't had a lot of spare time for that whole communication thing. or maybe a more true statement would be that i haven't had the time to process my life so i haven't really known what to say. the last 2 months have been quite eventful - in work, in play, in learning, in every other area... there has been plenty to write about, but no space in which to write. i know that's my own fault, so please forgive me. i will try to be better in 2008. :)

faye reprimanded me the other day about my 2 month absence from the blog-world. she brought it up right after we were invited to the beach this past sunday where one of our favorite uncles would be slaughtering and roasting a goat... faye's suggestion was that i video the killing of said goat, and then post it on this blog to "draw back the audience." good idea, but that would require that i witness the slaughter myself, and i really wasn't up for that. she was a cute goat. black and white, with kind eyes. they drove her to the beach that morning in the back of my friend's jeep. they said she was quiet and well-mannered on the drive. i said it was nice that they were able to spend some time getting to know her before they cut her throat... almost enough to make me a vegetarian, but no. don't worry dad, i'm still a country girl. and i still love me some red meat.

Christmas was eventful and busy and fun and kinda strange this year. i have spent the holiday away from home before, but i was traveling and distracted and excited about the change of scenery. but this year wasn't like that. i told a few people that i think part of the difficulty was that the excitement of living here was starting to wear off at the exact wrong time... i still want to be here, don't get me wrong. but after 4 months, it's not all new and different and exotic anymore. it's like, i live here. this is it. so hitting that phase during holiday time wasn't fun. because i really just wanted to be with my family in my culture where i knew and understood all of the traditions and got to eat all of my favorite food and hear bing crosby and wear sweaters. it's the little things, it really is...

it was good though. our Christmas parties for the kroo bay kids and the lighthouse program went really well. it was fun to celebrate with the kids, and i was told by numerous people (who could easily see how homesick i was) that they would be glad to stand in as family for me. so, i missed the moselys and mcGuires immensly, but was so so so humbled by the willingness of others to welcome me into their own lives and homes and families. wow.

new year's was an event worth writing home about. one of my friends here is a lebanese guy who used to make a living playing "one man shows" in beirut. basically he gets set up on two very complicated keyboards at once and sings and plays hours and hours worth of arabic music. so he was hired to do a show at a resturant on the water for new year's eve. most of you are probably aware that the lebanese know how to work. they have a reputation across the globe as good business people. what you may not know is that the lebanese also know how to have fun. i had no clue what they were capable of in this area! anyway, it was a cultural experience that i certainly enjoyed. food, music, food, dancing, food. happy new year.

and, of course, i spent a lot of time at the beach over the holidays. so that sure helped with that whole homesick thing... :) but now it's back to reality. busy busy.

OH! this information won't be super exciting for you since you didn't know the situation beforehand, but... we have electricity at our house now! that's right, we haven't had electricity since we moved in. we would occasionally borrow a generator so we could turn the lights on and charge things, but then we figured out that the house wasn't grounded (after cami's fan caught on fire and her computer battery was fried) so we haven't been able to plug anything in at our house for the last 2 months. anytime i've needed to charge anything i've had to haul it to a friend's house. but now the electricty situation is being sorted out, so we are all happy. i slept with a fan on ALL night last night. it was the best thing ever. i'm worried that i'm going to revert back to my old over-sleeping self now. this seems like an appropriate time to tell you that we also don't have running water. :) we buy water in 5 gallon rubber containers, and take bucket showers. hopefully that will get sorted out soon as well. i'll keep you posted.

8 weeks

today is the 8 week anniversary of my arrival in freetown! faye said we need to celebrate and that she'll buy me a coke. i said that the last thing i need is another coke. i rarely drink regular pop in the states, but i cannot get enough of it here... oh i love coke. bottled. canned. on ice. lukewarm. love love love coke.

soooo, a lot has happened since late september. cami and faye both left for the states at the end of the month. faye's trip was planned, but cami's departure was a bit sudden. they are both back now, and things are getting back to normal, but that week and a half without either of them really wore me out. i said a lot of "i don't know the answer" and "i don't know how to do that" during those 11 days. ah, humility.

also, we moved. it was a very quick and chaotic move, but we actually moved, so no one is complaining. it happened at the end of ramadan, which made it even more interesting. i said to a friend during the process, "moving never goes as planned, and we live in africa, where NOTHING goes as planned to begin with... so i wonder what today is gonna be like..." we had a lot a lot a lot of help from some very generous friends who loaned us trucks and workers and boxes and all sorts of things. oh!! and the funniest part... we had a specific day that we needed to be out of the old house because someone was moving in. but we were still waiting on some little details to be finished at the new place. so on a wednesday, faye and i were talking to some friends about needing to be out by the next tuesday. it seemed like plenty of time... what we were forgetting was that the weekend marked the end of ramadan, which meant a 3-day weekend. however, we didn't know exactly which day was the last day of ramadan because they had to wait to see what the moon would do in saudi arabia. so the holiday would either be friday/saturday/sunday. or saturday/sunday/monday. but we wouldn't know until thursday night, and this was on a wednesday. so at 10 o'clock on wednesday we realized that we absolutely had to move on thursday if we were going to be certain that we were out by tuesday... i'm tired again just recounting this. anyway, it was crazy, but it's over and here is a picture of my new room:

the new place is great, and so convenient. i can walk anywhere work-related that i need to go. and we can catch transport to a lot of places right out of the front door. we have a pretty good breeze most of the time because we're on the third floor and i can see water from my bedroom window! it's really far away, but i'm from the midwest, so i don't care. i live by the sea!!! the biggest negative for me is that the place is so loud. so so so loud. all day it's loud. usually quiet by 11 at night. loud again starting with the call to prayer around 5:30. many of you know how difficult it is to wake me up. i love to sleep and i do it very well. but not here. i wake up early every day, and i run on not enough sleep until i'm so tired that i can't function, and then i get 10 hours of sleep a couple of days in a row and start the whole process over again. so that's kinda hard. but i'm adjusting.

things with the kids are going okay. we're getting used to each other. they push my limits sometimes, and i am insensitive sometimes, and in between those times we laugh and try to get to know each other. again, adjusting.

tutoring the little ones is going well. that's my favorite part of the day. monday i will start working with them at our house instead of at noah's and i think that will be much better. first of all, it's more convenient for me, so i'll have more time with them. secondly, the child who needs the most one-on-one attention goes to school right by our house, so he'll be able to get there before the others and get the attention he needs. also, there won't be other people going in and out of the house so the kids that have trouble focusing might actually be able to focus. i'm excited about the change. and the kids are REALLY excited. they just like to be at our house. it's maybe something like what i felt when i got to go to Grandma's. oh no, did i just equate myself to a grandma? i think you know what i mean...

i've been to the beach twice so far and i'm going again this weekend, so i'll try to take some pictures and post them. and then i can introduce you to some of my new friends. i've made some really fun friends who i enjoy a lot. they keep me sane. most of the time... i'm still me, so i can't be sane aalllll of the time. you know.

okay thanks for being so patient waiting for this boring update. i love you all and will try try try to post more often. happy fall! i can't believe it's november... it's getting hotter here and colder there. i'm all mixed up. anyway, ENJOY!